Helping Provide COVID-19 Vaccination to People Experiencing Homelessness
Highlights
- Cities and counties around the country need to vaccinate people experiencing homelessness against COVID-19.
- Abt partnered with HUD, CDC, and local COCs to provide tailored assistance.
- Abt provided technical assistance, including planning documentation, communications support and implementation.
For more than 10 years, Abt Associates’ 20-person technical assistance (TA) team has supported the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) work with local Continuums of Care (CoCs) and homeless assistance providers to reduce and end homelessness. When COVID hit, part of the team’s work shifted to helping 30 cities and counties around the country manage the influx of $4 billion in Emergency Solutions Grant (ESG) funding via the CARES Act. As vaccines have become available, Abt is helping communities ensure that people experiencing homelessness are prioritized for vaccination efforts.
With HUD, community partners, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Abt’s team is developing tools and products to support local projects in their efforts to effectively and equitably administer the vaccine, and providing guidance directly to communities to support them in this effort.
Vaccine TA efforts launched in mid-December 2020 and were completed in late February 2021. In that time, the Abt team:
- Worked on approximately 20 TA documents for HUD, many of which are now publicly available on the HUD Exchange
- Worked with seven communities to review and help inform their state vaccination plans, and
- Provided guidance to help ensure that people experiencing homelessness were prioritized for the vaccine.
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